Hey folks, let's talk about Catholic nuns, Reagan and the stripping of healthcare from trans people during the 80's, and how TERFs were always aligned to the right, arming them with arguments and rhetoric to better discriminate against trans people.
Now, it shouldn't be any news to people that the Reagan administration did an incredible amount of harm to LGBT folks, but it wasn't just the AIDS crisis. Up until the 80's, trans people could access health insurance.
Then Reagan happened.
Federal health insurance was stripped away and private healthcare companies took this as precedent to strip coverage of trans people themselves, it had a tremendously damaging knock-on effect.
This meant that if you accessed any trans-related healthcare, you couldn't be insured.
The precursor to this was a report that was written for the Reagan administration called "Technology on the Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery" which outright called for the elimination of transsexualism. This was the basis for what Reagan did to trans people.
The person who wrote that report was not a medical doctor with any experience in treating trans people, but rather a former Catholic nun and author of "The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male" Janice Raymond.
Raymond's Transsexual Empire is perhaps the most foundational work in establishing trans exclusionary radical feminism as a distinct ideology, and along with Catholic theologian Mary Daly, she helped to foment this particular strain of 'lockstep with conservatism' feminism.
Now I keep mentioning religion, because this is the key to understanding TERF ideology. Raymond being a former Catholic nun belonging to the Sisters of Mercy sect, and Daly's education being from Catholic church run university CUA, University of Fribourg, and St. Mary's.
It is through a Catholic lens you need to view TERF ideology. Both Janice Raymond and Mary Daly were lesbian feminists, but their brand of feminism was just accepting enough that they didn't hate themselves for their attraction to women, while retaining a Catholic outlook.
This is why we see TERFs who are all but conservative Christians in that they are anti-sex work, anti-pornography, and prize chasteness and celibacy, except for being accepting of lesbianism. It is an ideology informed by its Catholic roots.
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This is something I'm finding incredibly frustrating, bad games get so much attention, be it this or that Kong game or the shitty Silent Hill rip off, they suck the oxygen out of the room and there are so many games far more deserving of the spotlight the likes of Gollum had.
And I get it, the designated garbage game du jour gets a public flogging because it's easy for anyone to get their dunks in without having played it, but it stinks considering how there are so excellent games that barely get a fraction of the hyper-attention paid to Bad Game™
You know what was amazing? Laika: Aged Through Blood
Incredible and super tough metroidvania where you play as a coyote riding a motorbike pulling off amazing stunts with bullet time, it's absurd, like "Max Payne in Tony Hawk's Hollow Knight" kinda absurd
It's kind of a shame how much attention a bad game can get because everyone's dunking on it, when there's so many neat little games that deserve so much more attention, and don't get it. Kinda wish we could have more of that energy for uplifting the good stuff that needs it.
I've been playing a few gems that've flown under the radar a bit this year, from the Devil Daggers inspired Killbug, Shardpunk Verminfall exceptional turn-based strategy roguelike, slick movement and puzzles of Teslagrad 2, or the weird medieval guys of Inkulinati, and more.
And I swear, everyone's missing out on Stasis: Bone Totem, which is not only a terrific point & click adventure, and not only a terrific horror game, it has single the best character I've come across this year so far and I *NEED* more people to meet him.
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is the new one from Shadow Tactics/Desperados 3 developer Mimimi, looks fantastic, with a very awesome undead pirate theme this time around.
I don't want to just say "it's a cult" and leave it at that, but organised transphobia employs a lot of cult like tactics and actively does a lot of damage to the people who buy into it, isolating them from friends and even family, so transphobia becomes their only social outlet.
Like, y'know the way fundamentalists are sent out proselytizing, not really to convert anyone, but to make them feel rejected or even hated by people outside their church? It's like that with organised transphobia and keeping folders of porn to spam at strangers on social media.
And spamming porn at strangers isn't normal, it's not something that's gonna convince anyone of your stance, nobody's gonna see some weirdo who's using multiple sockpuppet accounts to shit up their mentions and go "Hmm, yes... you've got a point there."
This was in the context of Ireland's referendum on marriage equality, and this was just the level of vile they felt comfortable putting in print. What LGBT people campaigning for the Yes vote were subjected to on social media from homophobic bigots at that time was starkly worse
You can see in that article a rhetoric that speaks in reference to the unsaid, it's couching a lot of its language in the reader knowing something that it's not willing to explicitly say outright; "Fair debate is being suppressed, No campaigners are being attacked"
See the reference to gay marriage harming children? It's all a nod and a wink to what every homophobic bigot up and down the country was repeating; that gay men were all pedophiles and marriage equality was a ploy to adopt children to abuse.
Sorry I haven't streamed, overslept. But here's a pic from Kiki's big outing yesterday evening. She has a fantastic time.
Kiki is getting pretty old, she'll be 14 this year, and she can be very grumpy and not want to go for walks. She wouldn't even go down the street for me yesterday evening. So fine, we went for a drive, took her out to a beach, and then she was full of excitement and adventure!
She was running about, clambering all over the rocks, dove in a little tide pool, sniffing and investigating everything, zooming about and barking at us to catch up with her, hopping up and running along the wall on the way back to the car. She was very tuckered out later on.